The Tina Turner Live In Concert Tour, VM World’s Streets Of San Francisco Event, Heat Ultra Lounge at Disneyland, and Screen Test, a rock show/video installation, have been selected as the winners of the Live Design Second Annual Excellence Awards.
Online voting for the Excellence Awards represents an opportunity for industry professionals to be recognized among their peers for the best projects in concerts, corporate events, venues, and theatre production. The awards will be presented in New York City on Monday, May 19, 2009 as part of the annual Live Design Master Classes at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on Washington Square South.
With Baz Halpin as creative director/lighting designer and Mark Fisher handling production and set design, Tina Turner, eight-time Grammy Award winner and Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, was in good hands for her tour, which concludes in Europe in April 2009. The mission for the production crew was simple and challenging at the same time: To make the stage show as powerful and exciting as the performer herself. Run on an MA Lighting grandMA console, the lighting rig includes a wall of 88 Clay Paky Alpha Beam 300s, which Halpin says create “an incredible impact without overwhelming the other stage elements. We were able to use all of their features in different ways to get a gorgeous variety of looks.”
For VM World’s Streets of San Francisco party, Tom Bercu of Tom Bercu Presents worked with DaVinci Fusion Inc. to turn an empty old, gigantic WWII airport hanger on Treasure Island in the heart of San Francisco Bay into a nightclub crawl for 10,000 people, while featuring some name entertainment in the parking lot. The eye-catching interior vignettes ranged from SFAsia, Mission Mariachi, the Giants Sports Bar, and the North Beach Jazz and Blues Club to a Haight-Ashbury Coffee House, SOMA Games, and Downtown Comedy Exchange—each with a custom façade and décor.
Heat Ultra Lounge, in Disneyland’s Resort District—designed by Nikko Hendi of NKDDI—is strategically located adjacent to the Anaheim Convention center and Disneyland. The objective of the venue was to fill a void in Orange County nightlife and give a reason to local club goers to stay in Orange County and not venture out to Hollywood and Las Vegas. The 13,000sq-ft. venue, accommodating 850 guests, in a very luxurious and fluid curved wall design, has now become one of Southern California’s top 10 nightclubs of 2008, according to Los Angeles Times.
Rob Roth is a New York based visual artist who conceived and directed Screen Test as a combination rock show and video installation piece featuring actress and singer, Theo Kogan and her band, the Skyscrapers. When he staged Screen Test staged at the Abrons Art Center in the Harry De Jur Playhouse on Grand Street on New York’s Lower East Side, Roth removed all the legs used for masking around the stage and the back cyc to reveal the raw space—including the fly system, exposed brick walls, and the metal gate to the set shop—to create the feel of a Hollywood soundstage and a post-apocalyptic look. The show opens and closes with two “live body projection” monologues.